under the pseudonym Jimi Hendrix. CNN played silently on the television set. When a headline about investigators finding images of child pornography at Pee-wee Herman’s house scrolled across the screen, Rock shook his head. “One of the funniest guys who ever lived,” he sighed.
So many of your jokes and characters revolve around crack.
CHRIS ROCK: Basically, whatever was going on when you started getting laid will stick with you for the rest of your life. So crack was just a big part of my life, between my friends selling it or girls I used to like getting hooked on it. White people had the Internet; the ghetto had crack. It’s weird, too. Crack and the VCR and the portable handheld camera—all this shit just came out at the same time.
And how are they connected for you?
ROCK: That whole being-able-to-tape-shit came out around the same time as crack. So you saw all these weird images of like guys’ mothers blowing people on video for some crack. Or you go over to your friend’s house and there’s a porno tape of a girl you used to date blowing eight guys. That’s crack.
I remember this rich kid from high school smoking crack in a cheap motel and hiring hookers off the street to smoke with him.
ROCK: That’s crack too. I have never been to war, but I survived that shit. I lost friends and family members. The whole neighborhood was kind of on crack—especially living in Bed-Stuy [in Brooklyn], man.
And at the same time, in the end, what does this produce? Gangsta rap. This is one of the things that goes into the misogyny of rap. You see all these young guys with this weird distorted view of women because these women they used to hold on a pedestal are now doing all this nasty shit.
Especially in LA: It’s the home of the groupies, so then it’s also got to be the home of the normal guys getting left behind. So you combine that and crack, and you see a bunch of guys with real fucked-up views on women. That’s how you get N.W.A. That’s how you get a record like “A Bitch Iz A Bitch.” That’s how you get Tupac saying crazy shit on record.
So did you ever try it?
ROCK: The closest I ever got to doing crack was selling crack. Me and a friend of mine, we took these jobs at a camp just to get money. We were going to get paid a thousand or two thousand at the end of the summer, and then take that money and buy some crack to sell. But of course he got hooked on crack before we could go out and do it. And then right after that, God brought comedy into my life.
I wonder what would have happened if you’d started selling it?
ROCK: Who knows what would have happened? I would have been dumb to have done it. I’m not saying, “If it wasn’t for comedy, I’d be selling crack.” But I remember sitting with my friends, cutting up coke like it was yesterday: cocaine, lactose, vitamin B12. Cook it up—crack. I am so lucky I never tried crack. The most I did was put some coke on my tongue.
What gave you the strength and the resources to avoid it?
ROCK: I don’t know if it was the strength and the resources. One of my brothers is an abuser of . . . things. So he kind of saved my life, by his example. People always get mad at athletes for getting high. I’m happy for every one. Dwight Gooden saved my life, Darryl Strawberry saved my life—because they always get punished. It’s not like they get caught doing drugs and then they get a raise.
What did you mean earlier when you said that God brought comedy into your life?
ROCK: It’s not even about bringing me into stand-up. It was just about getting me out of Brooklyn, especially at night. Brooklyn’s fine during the day. But at night, man, I would probably have eventually tried some crack, just out of boredom.
[Continued . . .]
Patrick Miller was a legend, as far as I was concerned. Better known as Minimal Man, he was a pioneer of electronic and industrial music with at least six albums to his name, and had played with many legendary experimental and alternative musicians of the eighties.
But when I met him, he had fallen on hard times. He was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and, outside of the Dominican drug dealers in the neighborhood, I seemed to be the only person who visited his basement apartment. I would stop by every other day and he would regale me with stories of punk, industrial, and new wave musicians.
On his wall, alongside prints by Bruce Nauman and Dennis Oppenheim, hung his own paintings. I recognized them from the covers of his albums, which I played regularly on my college radio show at the time. They were all variations on one image: a featureless head, usually wrapped in strips of bandages that were peeling off to reveal a discolored, decomposed face.
One afternoon during my junior year of college, I came by to accompany him to a rock-industry convention, the New Music Seminar. But after an hour of puttering around his house, he didn’t seem to be any closer to leaving.
PATRICK MILLER: I want to find that guy from Play It Again Sam [Recordings] and make him pay me. You know, that’s all the seminar is: musicians looking for record executives who owe them money.
Are you ready to go yet?
MILLER: I’m thinking of building a holding tank here.
For your cat?
MILLER: No, for drug dealers. . . . I feel like there are ants under my skin. I need to get high if I’m going to have to deal with this.
If you do that, we’re never going to get out of here.
Miller walks into the kitchen and continues talking as he scrapes white powder out of a pot on his kitchen counter.
MILLER: For some reason, pharmacologists, doctors, and nurses are always attracted to my music. That’s how I got started. They’d invite Minimal Man to play all these parties, and then feed us coke. (Drops the powder into the end of a glass pipe.) I invented Minimal Man as this wild person, and then I actualized it and took all kinds of drugs and stuff because I felt guilty for not living up to this fiction. For a while I was shooting an eightball a day. That’s like a hundred shots. It got so crazy that I thought I’d take something to cool me off, so I got into heroin, thinking that it would help me free myself from drugs. Do you know how heroin works?
More or less.
MILLER: Your body is in pain every second of the day. Every molecule of air that is hitting it is causing a pain reaction. But because the body produces its own opiates, it blocks the pain. So when you take heroin and get those opiates externally, your brain stops producing its own painkillers. That’s why it’s so hard to withdraw, because when you stop, you feel all the pain you never did before.
I try to distract him to keep him from smoking the crack he’s heating in the pipe.
Ever heard of that band Lights in a Fat City?
MILLER: Shh.
He takes a deep drag off the pipe. Seconds after he exhales, his eyes start darting around, as if there’s something hiding in the shadows of the room. He snatches a flashlight from his desk and turns it on, even though the lights in his house are already shining. He then begins scanning the room, looking for something, as he backs into a corner. Suddenly, he pulls a chair in front of him, crouches behind it, and grabs the book Rush by Kim Wozencraft off his desk.
MILLER: Is there a fly around? I can’t stand flies. I’m prone to hallucinations. As soon as I see a little thing buzzing around in front of my eyes,